One could take a very strong stance and say that idols are anything that we rely on as a stand-in for the underlying reality, and thus impair ourselves from seeing God in his full clarity. And the Romans and Greeks of antiquity often created and worshipped idols which didn’t represent the supreme God, but instead were stand-ins for certain concepts, such as “reason” or “love”. In fact, during the time that the apostle John wrote that “God is Love”, the Babylonians believed that “Love is god”, and worshipped her in the form of Ishtar. Personally, I think it’s best to be overly sensitive about idolatry, rather than complacent.

I think of “worship” as meaning, “believe that your sustenance and survival comes from the thing, and thus seek to preserve and elevate it”. In that sense, the models I make are not intended to be worshipped, so I think you are right.

However, there are certainly large groups of people who believed that society’s survival was born of “financial innovation”, or “capitalism”, or similar. And the restriction on eating idol food was not about making sure that Christians kept away from idolatry, but to make sure that they didn’t perpetuate and encourage idolatry in others by tying their nourishment to the idolatry of others.

As an example, if I accepted a contract from the author of http://originofwealth.com, or took a portion of my paycheck from helping investment funds implement and sell models based on this sort of faith in the “goodness of the markets”, I think that would constitute “eating food that had been sacrificed to idols”, because I would be receiving money that had been given by duped idolators out of an unreasonable and idolatrous faith in the markets. I don’t think I’ve done anything like that, but I haven’t been all too cautious, either.

Am I missing something here? How would any christian eat or pay rent in this day and age? Abram refused to take all the king’s riches, but he didn’t refuse a fair share for soldiers. Are they damned if they accept their share?